The one-woman operation bringing the NFL to Australia

“At the moment it’s at my house,” Offord laughs.

It might seem incongruous that the biggest and most capitalistic American sports league of them all, the one that leagues across the world model themselves on, is operating such a low-key mission.

For now Offord is a one-woman band. She assures me a proper office and staff will follow.

But when the NFL season opened a few weeks ago with billionaire owners and millionaire players squaring off in front of the biggest television audiences America can muster, their first ever full-time Australia/New Zealand General Manager was talking to local schools in Queensland about implementing a flag football competition.

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Offord worked on the 2012 London Olympics, but has spent the past 10 years with the NFL in the United Kingdom, helping sell America’s game to the British.

Given the NFL’s fiscal responsibility to owners, it must be working. No less than 30 NFL regular season games have been played in London since 2007. This Monday morning Australian time Minnesota will take on New Orleans in the first of three games for 2022.

Now she’s implementing a version of that strategy from the UK here. But why Australia?

“We started tracking Australian data about two years ago,” Offord tells CODE Sports.

“I understand in research terms that’s not a huge amount of time, but what it showed us, even between year one and two, was a dramatic increase in organic growth in fans across the market.”

The NFL were surprised to find that Australia had emerged as the NFL’s fastest growing fan market.

“We looked at that and said, ‘Wow, we’re growing fans without really investing money in this market’.

“So we thought, what if we actually put boots on the ground and invested dollars into the market, creating NFL fan events and touch points, could we further accelerate this growth?”

That research was highlighted by figures claiming the NFL has 7.3 million ‘fans’ in Australia, 1.5 million of them ‘avid fans’.

If those numbers seem way too high it may be more due to a general awareness of Eminem, Beyonce, and later this season, Rihanna performing at the Super Bowl rather than the week-to-week exploits of Josh Allen, Patrick Mahomes and Aaron Rodgers.

Nonetheless, television, social media and survey metrics suggest that genuine NFL fans are growing rapidly in Australia. It’s been the catalyst for Offord being sent to set-up shop.

“There’s a core market of fans that follow it all the time, and there’s a bigger market that say, ‘I like it but I don‘t know much about it’,” Offord says.

“So we’re looking at how we grow that avid fan number.”

The NFL classifies an avid fan as someone that may participate in the NFL in two or more ways such as watching on TV, following on social media, playing fantasy football or buying NFL merchandise.

And it’s no surprise the youth market is where the NFL is looking.

“Overall we tend to over-index internationally on younger fans, a lot of organic growth comes from that younger demographic,” she says.

“So we’ll be doubling down on youth marketing. What are the right touchpoints, social media, influencer marketing and fan events.”

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That doubling down starts next week, albeit in an understated fashion, when the NFL launches a pilot program for flag football in Australian schools for the first time.

Flag football is essentially touch gridiron. Ten schools in Queensland and Northern NSW will be the first to experience it over a six-week period, complete with NFL branding.

Recently a day was held for PE teachers in the region to come and learn the game and be charmed by Offord and the NFL.

“I genuinely thought it might be a hard sell, but we were pleasantly surprised by the uptake from schools who said yes,” Offord explains.

“We are not a sport that is played commonly in Australia, so it’s a test to see and learn how the school system works, and how we can adapt what our program will be.”

While that sounds like the development plan of any small sport battling to lift its participation rates, the difference is this is the global behemoth NFL.

That small program is backed by the glamour of accessible television broadcast of games, the Super Bowl and merchandise already worn by kids around Australia.

There’s also a further carrot for the pilot program.

In November a tournament between those pilot schools will see the winning team in the 10-12 year old age bracket earning an all expenses paid trip to Las Vegas to represent Australia in flag football competition around the Pro Bowl in February.

You can then see why that over-indexed youth portion of the million fans the NFL say it has in Australia that already wear NFL T-shirts and caps could easily be seduced to play the game when it’s served up to them at school.

The NFL plans to expand the program exponentially in schools over the next few years.

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The governing body of Gridiron Australia has been in operation since 1996, and there has been a steady sprinkling of Australians playing in the NFL since the mid-1990s but it’s only now that the NFL is taking an active role in Australia as a player development region too.

“Previously it hasn’t really been touched by us at the NFL,” Offord admits.

“Can we find an athlete in their mid-teens and take them on a pathway to the college system and then the NFL. And then there’s our International Player Program which accelerates already high-level athletes into the NFL, Jordan Mailata is an example of that.”

Rugby league convert Mailata signed a $64 million contract extension last year with the Philadelphia Eagles after originally going through the program in 2018 and then making his NFL debut in 2020. Like former AFL player Darren Bennett opening the door for Australian punters in the 1990s, Mailata is doing the same for potential rugby league converts.

There are eight Australians currently plying their trade in the NFL, including former St Kilda AFL player Arryn Sipposs, who is Mailata’s teammate as a punter on the Eagles roster.

These player conversions have almost been organic, brought about by private coaching companies like Prokick (led by former AFL player Nathan Chapman). The NFL thinks the time is right to help provide a more formal structure and pathway.

“A lot of players outside Jordan have basically created their own pathways through Prokick and the like. I think it‘s a matter of how we create more of that, make it more accessible and help people understand there is a pathway for them.

“Right now if you’re 16, do you really know how a punter made it to the NFL?”

You can bet that the answer will be provided as part of the new schools program.

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All of this is not good news if you are a small sport battling to stay relevant in the hotly contested participation market.

Offord says all the right things about not wanting to trample on toes and simply being an option to get more kids active, but administrators in smaller sports could be excused for feeling forlorn that a new competitor with that financial heft is now in the game too.

How the big dogs like the AFL and NRL react or co-operate with the NFL will also be interesting.

The AFL in particular has long looked to the NFL for a handle on its business future, its critics would say slavishly so. Study tours for administrators where the NFL and clubs have opened their doors have been commonplace.

Pre-pandemic it was only half joked that you needed to go to the Super Bowl to get a meeting with any high ranking AFL executives in early February.

Offord has been in contact with the AFL and it can be expected that, for the time being at least, the relationship will continue to be cooperative.

Junior programs that run in parallel to the NFL season would be cooperative with keeping away from NRL and AFL seasons, but it won’t allay any fears smaller sports may have.

“The AFL and NRL mens seasons are ending now, and we’re into week four so we have a whole rest of the season where those codes are in their off-season,” Offord says.

“Past week four it feels like there’s an opportunity for people to turn onto the NFL as part of their sporting calendar.”

Summer sports might just need to keep an eye on this, for-now, fledgling one-woman operation.

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While setting up a full-time office in Australia for the first time will have NFL fans in Australia excited, there’s one white whale that Offord admits “is not on the cards right now.”

The new office will work with broadcasters ESPN and Seven to complement their coverage with more access to interview players, but bringing a regular season game to Australia still seems a while off.

“The stadiums in this country are fantastic but there’s a lot of elements that go into bringing a game into a market,” says Offord.

“Time being one of them, bringing a heavy number of players and coaches and staff is another one, the field of play and the different elements that make a game viable.

“So it's not as easy as just saying, ‘We want to bring one and off we go’, it does take a lot of planning and detail to make sure what we’re delivering is the authentic game that’s played in the USA.”

Just like the NBA fans who’ve wished to see a game on our shores for decades, it seems that those avid NFL fans will have to keep multiplying before we see the real thing up close.

Office or no office.

“I would love to see it happen though,” says Offord.

“We never say never.”